Are Mods that Good or are Games that Bad?

[27X]

On 6/9/2019 at 3:34 AM, Alkpaz said:

Watch them screw it up... just watch.

Considering the people now working for beamdog are literal stereotype SJWs, you should be very very grateful larian took up the license.

[StaticPhobia2]

The problem is with the consumer. It used to be that games were designed to be fun, original, and to push technological limits. But now, the consumer practically throws their money at the screen just for a rehash of the same generic game. The game devs have found the right formula to extract money from the typical consumer with minimal creativity. Mod devs typically want to see something different with their creations, than a typical generic rehash. Take Frost Fall for example. Bethesda would never have included a survival aspect like that in their game, yet I think Frost Fall is absolutely necessary for an immersive vanilla experience. However, Bethesda is not wrong in this decision. The majority of people just want a compass, with a waypoint, and easy bad guys to beat for a quick dopamine hit without much thought put into it.

 

I may get flak for saying this, but even Cyberpunk is going to be focusing more toward normie players than it is the Deus Ex/System Shock crowd. I know this because Witcher 3 is an RPG for the normie crowd, and E3 proved this point further with the Johnny Silverwick reveal. I'm sure it'll be a great game, but if you want a dystopian cyber-noir, I'm pretty sure Cyberpunk won't give it to you. They won't be wrong in that decision making either, because it's not worth the risk to appeal to a niche crowd (bloodlines 2 devs should take note of this, especially if they are going to fuck the entire series up, like they are).

 

TL:DR - Normies ruined games.

[FauxFurry]

Mods are that good. No matter how good a game is out of the box, nothing can beat customizing it to one's own exacting specifications. Games are kind of like cars in that regard. 

[Bazinga]

20 hours ago, 27X said:

Considering the people now working for beamdog are literal stereotype SJWs, you should be very very grateful larian took up the license.

They did?

That's fantastic news, I loved Divine Divinity and the two Divinity kickstarter games they did. I just hope they tone down their usually rather whacky humor for it, doesn't really fit.

 

@topic:

Regarding Bethesda I think that many complaints about Skyrim's art direction and textures/models are a bit over the top, I still believe that game looks better unmodded than with some of these high end PC texture/ENB mod packages. It's the cold, bleak north after all.

 And the models aren't THAT bad, most stuff like NPCs, dragons, environment models etc look good enough and in Skyrim's char gen  you can't create the monstrosities anymore that you could in Oblivion, at least not without trying really hard.

Of course that doesn't exonerate it, the game was a buggy mess years after release and even some of the much praised moddability is only because modders were persistent enough and hacked shit in themselves (like SKSE).

Also Bethesda still very much suck at creating fun gaming experiences. At least in my case I can't say that I really love any of their games.

Daggerfall was nice enough but as shallow as a puddle regarding worldbuilding. Also too much reliance on randomly generated dungeons/cities.

Morrowind was immersive af but also broken, leveling rewarded silly metagaming approaches too much (leveling minor skills instead of major ones, Oblivion did the same stupid shit I think) and fixed enemy levels in an open world where you could go wherever you wanted naturally led to the game getting way too easy too early. So after half of the game there was no challenge left.

Oblivion was just shit except for side quest design.

And Skyrim while getting rid of the broken leveling mechanics and some atricious skills that are no fun to level (like acrobatics) and having a much nicer art style than Oblivion was too bland and also had a lot of bad design decisions that held it back. You can still become master of all trades and leader of all guilds in one playthrough, which means that there are no real conflicts between the guilds and you don't have to make enemies. Even picking a side in the civil war doesn't  lead to realistic consequences like getting kicked out of some guild that's allied with one side. Also makes the guilds feel disconnected ... like that stupid companions guild, why should they not care about who rules them? Because it's the cool thing to do nowadays, pretend to not give a shit about politics?

 

So instead of choosing a side in a realistic conflict with mostly human ... or humanoid enemies they serve us the same stale old shit we expect from the fantasy genre, some ancient evil threatening the whole wide world. How original, did Todd let his toddler write that story? And because they knew that noone asked for that they added a civil war/racism to make it all seem less bland. Which was clearly an afterthought because otherwise what you did in that civil war would lead to actual fucking consequences.

 

So long story short, I can forgive anything, like a game being quite buggy or subpar models/textures, but I can't forgive that soulless husk of a gameplay loop and these generic and unengaging/boring stories that make up most of the quest narratives. Storytelling was never Bethesda's strong suit but with Skyrim they made it ultimately clear that they don't give a shit about telling entertaining stories.

Which is okay if you are into sandboxes where the players create their own narrative but in unmodded state Skyrim doesn't have enough tools to tinker with to qualify for that category. So I'd say it's a unfun bastard child of different genres, there to disappoint anyone who plays it unmodded.

Then again there are enough people out there who seem quite content with games that are barely more than very shallow gameplay loops / quest reward chains, where you simply level up, get stronger and finish quests as if they were points on a grocery list. Heck there are even players that don't object to endlessly grinding the type of quests DA:I was infamous for, the "kill 5 wolves and bring me their pelts" stuff. Boggles the mind.

 

 

regarding other devs:

Depends on the dev I guess. As the recent tide of Kickstarters proved it's not just the evil publishers who are to blame for buggy games, it's often the devs themselves that seemingly don't want to invest in a sufficient amount of playtesting. Maybe it's the same as everywhere in any industry, nobody likes the QA guys because they won't stop nagging and pushing everyone to do better. Which often clashes with inflated egos, and since creating games is a rather creative/artistic process I'd expect more of those than in other industries. I'm not a QA guy btw so don't hate me, I'm just a guy who's fed up with his colleagues constantly bitching about our QA department. ^^

 

Anyway, there are good devs out there too. I rather like Larian (again, great news about BG3) even though they always release their games with tons of bugs left (the core gameplay is well balanced and fun though which is much much more important to me) and CD Project Red.

Cyberpunk might be the first game in years that I'll buy on release day.

[MrEsturk]

7 hours ago, 27X said:

Considering the people now working for beamdog are literal stereotype SJWs, you should be very very grateful larian took up the license.

Larian's creating a Baldur's Gate sequel? That's new to me, I guess I need to pay closer attention.

 

Sound's like it could be quite good if done right. I enjoyed Divinity: Original Sin quite a lot, even though I had to mod out the social justice censored costumes they shoehorned in late development because some asshats whined about it endlessly in the beta forums. Case in point on why modding is such a good thing: had Larian not censored the female outfits perhaps a different modder would have created a prudish outfit replacer for them. And their modded costumes likely would have looked better than the half ass, last minute outfit modifications Larian did. Left the rogue class females looking like they were wearing hillbilly longjohns under a leather bikini.

[27X]

2 minutes ago, MrEsturk said:

Larian's creating a Baldur's Gate sequel? That's new to me, I guess I need to pay closer attention.

 

Sound's like it could be quite good if done right. I enjoyed Divinity: Original Sin quite a lot, even though I had to mod out the social justice censored costumes they shoehorned in late development because some asshats whined about it endless in the beta forum. Case in point on why modding is such a good thing: had Larian not censored the female outfits perhaps a different modder would have created a prudish outfit replacer for them. And their modded costumes likely would have looked better than the half ass, last minute outfit modifications Larian did. Left the rogue class females looking like they were wearing hillbilly longjohns under a leather bikini.

I actually used that mod.

[RitualClarity]

On 6/18/2019 at 9:14 AM, JimKhan said:

I think it's both. Skyrim for example is a good game but it's so incredibly buggy that without mods it needs patience to squeeze fun out of, something that other game companies unlike Bethesda, actually think about. People are always on and on about Skyrim being so great and all but I firmly believe that only through the modding community did it achieve true greatness.

 

Another thing that I once talked about in a group of.. irritating Skyrim fanatics, was whether it's better than the Witcher 3 or not, which is a dumb argument if you ask me because TW 3 came out 4 years later but anyways; I said that my humble opinion was that the Witcher is just better and someone tried to convince me otherwise by using mods as proof. They claimed that Skyrim is better because there are tonnes more mods for it than the Witcher 3 even though many Skyrim mods are meant to fix problems or improve crappy mechanics, issues that The Witcher 3 has not, no need to fix something that isn't broken. Even so, I think it's a dumb argument, better to compare Skyrim to the Witcher 2 because both came out the same year and yet again, I believe the latter is better.

 

But despite all that, mods are just nice to have, you know? They give you something to spice up the game, make it different. I wholly understand why some people would rather enjoy a pure vanilla Skyrim and good for them, but even then I can't help but recommend they at least get the Unofficial Patch mods. You want to enjoy Skyrim the way it is, but the bugs, broken quests, crashes and other issues don't have to be part of that experience.

 

My experience was the same with Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, an old, wonderful but very buggy FPS horror game. I downloaded some Unofficial Patch kind of tools for it and it helps avoid some of the game's annoying bugs, including one that is at the very end of the game and could potentially stop you from completing it.

 

I hope my rambling offers something to your thoughts.

Witcher is a better game.. it is better written.. patched bugs more often and consistently, better voice acting and generally better fleshed out quest and core campaign. There is a reason it won so many awards time and time again. Skyrim didn't go that  far. 

 

Skyrim is the most flexible game in that you can make changes, alterations and yes many mods fix the issues that the game has, there are many that add entire lands to the game. you can't get that in Witcher.

 

Comparing Witcher to Skyrim is like comparing actual apples to oranges. There is no correct answer except the one the consumer is giving (wanting or desiring) so long as the features are known, one can make a good judgement.

[JimKhan]

49 minutes ago, RitualClarity said:

Witcher is a better game.. it is better written.. patched bugs more often and consistently, better voice acting and generally better fleshed out quest and core campaign. There is a reason it won so many awards time and time again. Skyrim didn't go that  far. 

 

Skyrim is the most flexible game in that you can make changes, alterations and yes many mods fix the issues that the game has, there are many that add entire lands to the game. you can't get that in Witcher.

 

Comparing Witcher to Skyrim is like comparing actual apples to oranges. There is no correct answer except the one the consumer is giving (wanting or desiring) so long as the features are known, one can make a good judgement.

Yes, I agree that generally speaking the comparison is wrong. Both games are fantasy RPGs but apart from that are very different conceptually. To be honest, I don't like comparisons, except in games that belong to the same franchise, I only referenced this in the context of mods and how good they are.

[Pork Type]

On 6/18/2019 at 3:11 PM, StaticPhobia2 said:

The problem is with the consumer. (Bolding by Me) It used to be that games were designed to be fun, original, and to push technological limits. But now, the consumer practically throws their money at the screen just for a rehash of the same generic game. The game devs have found the right formula to extract money from the typical consumer with minimal creativity. Mod devs typically want to see something different with their creations, than a typical generic rehash. Take Frost Fall for example. Bethesda would never have included a survival aspect like that in their game, yet I think Frost Fall is absolutely necessary for an immersive vanilla experience. However, Bethesda is not wrong in this decision. The majority of people just want a compass, with a waypoint, and easy bad guys to beat for a quick dopamine hit without much thought put into it.

 

I may get flak for saying this, but even Cyberpunk is going to be focusing more toward normie players than it is the Deus Ex/System Shock crowd. I know this because Witcher 3 is an RPG for the normie crowd, and E3 proved this point further with the Johnny Silverwick reveal. I'm sure it'll be a great game, but if you want a dystopian cyber-noir, I'm pretty sure Cyberpunk won't give it to you. They won't be wrong in that decision making either, because it's not worth the risk to appeal to a niche crowd (bloodlines 2 devs should take note of this, especially if they are going to fuck the entire series up, like they are).

 

TL:DR - Normies ruined games.

 

[StaticPhobia2]

10 minutes ago, Pork Type said:

Spoiler

 

 

LOL, awesome.

[Radfahrer]

After seeing what modders are capable of doing in my 33 years of gaming (started at the ripe age of 5 ) I can easily say :

 

MODDERS ARE THAT FRIGGING GOOD .

 

Examples ?

MW:LL for Crysis/Crysis Wars … a BattleTech mod that made stuff possible that Crytek themselves said was not possible with the engine .

ArmA series … Modders added gigatons of stuff while fixing gigatons of issues BI couldn´t .

Fallout/ElderScrolls series … after watching the Nexus for over a decade and LoversLab since I found this page I just gotta say that you modcreators are gods of gaming, a bit like Aladdin . You make wishes come true .

 

My shout-outs go to all you modders, thanks for doing what you do, I love you !

[Jindale]

There are couple examples the game being just that good, Company Of Heroes (the first one) and Jagged Alliance 2 are pretty prominent in that regard. The latter being propably my favourite game of all time.

 

Fundamentally just excellent, well made pieces, and the mods for those games only highlight the greatness, creating a whole new experience like with COH1 mods. The 1.13 framework for JA2 on the other hand, oh man, what Bear's Pit has done over the years is nothing short of amazing. While not really changing the core gameplay nor the audiovisuals, 1.13 blows open the whole backend for maximum gameplay tailoring just the way one likes it. Not to mention the amazing pixel art for the new gear. Even made some myself, like porting Typhoon Metalstorm from Crysis 3.

 

But they don't sadly make games like that nowdays anymore, which is why I think all the talented modders are the sole reason newer games even stay relevant. And what it comes to Bethesda, despite Todd's numerous sweet little lies and fuckups, I do think his heart is in the right place, as malicious as that heart was with FO76. The tools Bethesda provides for modding is a credit deserved imo.

[ILikeTheWeird]

In regards to the Sims 4, it's both.

[Ernest Lemmingway]

Minor functionality issues or bugs that the company just won't fix but modders can, that's a case where mods can help make an otherwise bad game good. A game that is riddled with things a player doesn't like (like me with FO4), mods aren't going to help. A game that can stand on its own merits, mods just make it even better.

 

What makes one game good and another bad is up to individual taste, however.

[pinky6225]

Are Mods that Good or are Games that Bad?

 

Neither since if a game was that bad nobody would have it installed long enough to even bother to mod it

 

So what is a realistic expectation? Deux Ex was a decent game gave me about 30 hours of play but there are no mods to it i'm aware of so once i'd seen the 4 possible endings never bothered to load it again but that doesn't make it a bad game, if it could be modded to add extra content that would have been nice but would that suddenly have made all the vanilla content bad?

 

How much is the Beth hate really just becuz its "cool" to hate beth considering we still playing a game that was originally released 9 years ago?

[fred200]

Nine years ago, when Skyrim came out, Bethesda did not owe their soul to investment bankers.

When the Creation Kit was developed, Bethesda did not owe their soul to investment bankers.

Check the financial history for Zenimax. Since their major funding, their only concern has been monthly revenue.

All you can expect from Bethesda going forward are mobile games (microtransactions) and Games as a Service. And Creation Club of course.

I no longer have any hope for Starfield or Elder Scrolls Six. Their soul is long gone. Fallout 76 was kind of the nail in the coffin.

[Wolfstorm321]

The games are bad. Skyrim is a bad game. Accept it. The writing is poor, the characters are poor, the world is very small (compare it to old rpgs), you dont see the daedra from Oblivion (which were original creatures, not to be seem in any other franchise, and the real reason why I insisted in Oblivion up to 2015), instead its only draugr, draugr, draugr (which means zombie in old norse, in case you dont know), every fucking dungeon you go into. The civil war is poor and lackluster, and dont have any strategic element to it, with city battles being cut off from the initial release. The graphics, although they were good at release, have become obsolete by now.

 

Without the mods, Skyrim is just a sandbox skeleton. I cant imagine Skyrim without the body mods, tits and ass, hd textures, the weather mods, mods which change clothes and armors for npcs, the immersion mods which covers little details, but which makes a ton of difference. Just compare the vanilla guards and soldiers to those modded by NordWarUA mods.

 

The followers are bad. Lydia is ugly, her name is not nordic enough, her face is squarish, she dont have a story, she dont have a past. The Companions are just a lazy placeholder for the Fighters Guild, which was much better plot-wise. The Fighters Guild had the Blackwood Company to exert pressure on them, the Companions are just a empty tag team. The only vanilla follower in Skyrim which had a little personality was that guy in the ruins, who wanted to recover his family treasure. Heck, I had to take my ESO characters and port them to Skyrim to make it looks like they have a personality (although it only work for me in this case). And I cant imagine Skyrim without iAFT and the followers setting up camp at night and using its features.

 

And can you imagine Skyrim without CACO, AIM Combat Fix, Wizard Warrior, Ultimate Combat, TK mods, Vigor, Violens, Enhanced Blood, Dead Mutilation? You dont have brains and entrails flying in your screen without mods, you dont have npcs step-dodging your blows and flanking you, you dont have your character casting spells during melee, you dont have your character gloriously bathed in blood after a tough battle. Without mods, Skyrim combat is horrible, its childs play.

 

And the bugs? The bug in this game are many to count, fixed by the modders who cared for it.  If you want to play the civil war, you will need hundreds of soldiers in the screen, but not in Skyrim, as every npc starts floating in the air after a certain number. The engine cant process big battles. The game is so full of bugs that the younger players, with their sense of entitlement, think its a duty of every modder to fix it for them. No wonder the little entitled ones are against nude mods, and gets horrified by any pair of tits in their screens. They deserve the lackluster experiences the corporations deliver to them nowadays.

 

Bash me all you want, but the games are bad, they are not meant to endure anymore. If Skyrim endured so much, its because the modders did it.

[SkyTem]

Skyrim without mods is that bad   It's the huge number of mods that are good

[woodsman30]

Going with games are that bad... have not seen a good RPG in a long time unless I missed something care to retort? Bethesda gave us the CK that modders improved everything about the game bugs and all. I shudder to think how gaming could be if more developers did the same with releasing the tools to mod the their games but that will never happen.

[KoolHndLuke]

3 hours ago, woodsman30 said:

I shudder to think how gaming could be if more developers did the same with releasing the tools to mod the their games but that will never happen.

There's at least 50 games mentioned on this very site that are moddable to some extent. Nexus is adding more all the time it seems. Granted that I don't think every or even most games will be moddable in the future. But, I do think it is slowly catching on since having thousands or even millions of fans pour ideas and work into your games can be fun and financially rewarding for devs/publishers/investors. Plus it builds a strong rapport with the fan base and helps it grow into something that will last..... as opposed to companies just going for the obvious cash grab.

[woodsman30]

3 hours ago, KoolHndLuke said:

at least 50 games mentioned on this very site

Yes however, a game does not equate a good game there in lies the issue. As proposed by the title mods made Skyrim a great game but, the base game had a good plot and is a true RPG something lacking in game design. Now I have played and do play linear games but they lack that exploring feel and freedom there are some that are stand alone but rare. Some such linear game is The Last Of Us and earlier Gears Of War both are outstanding games. Not sure where gaming is headed but cash is king so I think that will always rule the day for modern gaming enter Creation Club...but, I digress.

[landess]

Neither.

 

Both.

 

In court, this is called a leading question and will generally be objected to by the opposing counsel.

 

Good mods can show how 'bad' a game is by exposing it's shortcomings. Bad mods can wreck a good game. One persons good is another persons bad. By reading into the question I'll say:

 

I mod few games, and those I do, generally benefit from extended play life as I experiment with the experience. Others which have mods available I generally won't because the vision and execution are enough to keep me invested.

 

It's easy to mindtrip on 'what I'd do different' when playing a game, and I guess this is what motivates mod makers to begin with.

 

Is it 'modding' if I change settings to run in VR?

 

New example: I grabbed CK2 years ago to play the Game of Thrones mod, but needed another DLC to use, so put it on the shelf. Seeing 'sexy' mods for it here has me checking it out again....

[donttouchmethere]

Mods are that good

 

Skyrim is the first game I buyed only after checking out what possible mods are out there.

Normally it was the other way around.

[wokking56]

On 2/7/2020 at 4:51 PM, Wolfstorm321 said:

The games are bad. Skyrim is a bad game. Accept it. The writing is poor, the characters are poor, the world is very small (compare it to old rpgs), you dont see the daedra from Oblivion

As much as I like Skyrim I have to agree with you. If not for mods I would have been done after my first play through. Hell if you just follow the main plot line it's over in a very short time. I understand that voice actors cost money and that has sadly really affected the dialog options, while way back in Morrowind you had you voiced greet and taunts but once you started a conversation a huge dialog box became available and it often felt like a real conversation one topic adding more topics to the box.

 

Yes Daedra, once again Morrowind boasted a dozen different types and yet in Skyrim around 3000 years later (according to the time line i found [which really sounds wrong to me] ) they no longer exist or seem to even be remembered.

 

On 2/7/2020 at 4:51 PM, Wolfstorm321 said:

I cant imagine Skyrim without the body mods, tits and ass, hd textures, the weather mods, mods which change clothes and armors for npcs,.. The followers are bad. Lydia is ugly,

Again I couldn't agree more. When it was first published back in 2011 the graphic were crap by the (then) current standards.

 

On 2/7/2020 at 4:51 PM, Wolfstorm321 said:

The Companions are just a lazy placeholder for the Fighters Guild, which was much better plot-wise

Agree, agree, agree. Now I keep going back to Morrowind because I didn't care for Oblivion as much but the guilds were much more fleshed out. Heck joining a guild might be difficult if not impossible if you were already the member of an opposing faction. Plus advancing through the guild made you feel like you did something since there was a rank system and each rank had requirements, your level and skills. Not just join do 4 or 5 BS quests and become the leader. I mean how can you be the Archmage at level 8 with almost no magical knowledge.

[Captain Cobra]

3 hours ago, wokking56 said:

Yes Daedra, once again Morrowind boasted a dozen different types and yet in Skyrim around 3000 years later (according to the time line i found [which really sounds wrong to me] ) they no longer exist or seem to even be remembered.

Yeah, the time gap between Morrowind and Skyrim is about 210 or so years.